Saturday, 19.11.2022, 4.30pm – 5.30pm

Tomasz Szrama presented himself at the NASUTI festival already in the opening year of 2018. His performance Social Encounters of Despair was one of the key works of the festival. In it, he demonstrated his ability to incorporate the local context into his artistic thinking and create a site-specific work in a few days. During the creation of the program of this year’s WILDERNESS festival, Szram’s performance was also chosen because of his ability to involve the audience in the process and to react quickly to changing conditions. The fact that as a performer he is interested in borderline situations and the human interactions embedded in them alongside with examination of his own experience, his piece will be a fundamental element for our theme this year. In his performance (Deadly) Wounded Art Sneaks Into The Gallery, he dealt with the theme of the artist’s presence, position and function in society, his ability to influence the course of things, or the search for answers in escapism in the form of a return to nature, placing his art outside of civilization and art institutions.

Tomasz Szrama (b. 1970 in Poland) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Wroclaw, Poland in 1998. He currently lives in Helsinki, Finland. Szrama moves between several artistic disciplines such as photography, video and procedural creation. Regardless of the medium, the dominant motif for him is the use of his own body and performance, which he has been engaged in since 1995. The characteristic feature of his work is the involvement of the audience, active participation of the audience and improvisation. Such a strategy anchors his works in the tradition of understanding performance art as procedural art, where the very moment of creation is essential. His work touches on the themes of travel, trust in interpersonal relationships and the ever-present possibility of personal failure.